from www.redbubble.com …it tickles me
http://www.redbubble.com/people/digerati/works/7709260-wanted-dead-and-alive-schrodingers-cat?country_code=GB&p=t-shirt&utm_campaign=shopping&utm_medium=google_products&utm_source=google&gclid=CNGDns7XkLcCFVDMtAodhmcA8A
I have just finished reading this book:
and it set me thinking…
Physicists are searching for ever-smaller particles by smashing up stuff with ever more energy – this is what the large hadron collider (LHC) is all about. Now I’m no physicist myself, but I’m fascinated by the way humankind has conducted this search for the real meaning of matter / time / space / energy etc. Let’s not forget that until Einstein showed the world that Newton didn’t have the real answer, we thought that the atom had two or three sub-components. Now there are dozens with attributes such as “spin”, “charm” “strangeness” (I kid you not). These particles and proprties are invented (not discovered) to fill in gaps in the current theories and observed experimental behaviour.
The problem seems to be that as you look in more and more detail. more and more seems to be “wrong” and thus requires more and more experimentation and new theories and particles e.g. the “Higgs Boson”. I have come up with an analogy that explains my view of the problem: Imagine that atoms are like blocks of ice.
Many moons ago, when technology was young, the biggest thing we could hit the ice with to see how it broke up was a small hammer. A good whack might break the ice into three or four large lumps (protons and neutrons) with a number of tiny shards (electrons) flying off. Physicists would find the lumps and shards, add them all together and hopefully arrive at the same amount of ice they started with, thus “proving” that large lumps and shards were indeed what the ice was made of.
Then someone made a sledge hammer. The lumps get smaller and occur in different sizes and the shard multiply wildly. Putting it all back together is more difficult and now we need a new theory and new names for the smaller lumps. Skip forward a few decades and we are now able to fire the ice at a concrete wall with a rocket. Lots more bits, many different sizes and a new theory required.
The problem as I see it is that we are always looking for small bits, and kind of missing the point that its actually all water…that the “bits” can in fact be any / every size depending on how hard you smash the block…wost of all is if you generate enough heat and some of the ice turns to steam and “disappears”, all your calculations are now wrong and you have to invent magical and mythical “bits” to account for the loss in weight, when in fact no “bits” are missing at all – you are just using the wrong tools!
For example although physicists accept that Newtonian mechanics don’t hold at sub-atomic level, they still use them to calculate momentum and energy of the various bits! Seems like they are trying to have their cake and eat it. Also, everything is predicated on the speed of light being fixed / constant. Which of course it is if you measure it with the wrong tools using a system of units and a frame of reference that are derived from the (fallible) Newtonian system!
Ironically it was Newton himself that said: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”
For my 2c (and what do I know?!) it seems as if modern physicists are doing the same thing: they have their heads so far down in the maths and theory and are fighting so hard to account for all the small particles that they have missed the ocean of truth that all of it is wrong wrong wrong from the start. Much of what we currently “know” derives from those heady 30 years of progress described in the book…that was almost one hundred years ago!
So, physicists, what if there are no particles, what if its all the same strange soup that your rulers can’t measure? Einstein told us that energy and matter are the same thing with E=mc2 – what if m isn’t actually a unit of anything you can actually measure because it’s a frozen sort of E ? What if galactic soup only look lumpy because you are using the wrong glasses to look at it?
We need a new Einstein, a new Niels Bohr – a new way of thinking, not a bigger hammer.
Every so often, I have to force myself to pause and say “Is it only me who can see this? Why is the rest of the world so dumb?”. That is usually followed by a more balanced “Hold on, what have I missed? Ten billion other people can’t all be wrong…” When it comes to getting your site on the first page / top 10 results of Google, I’m afraid that it is very simple to show that yes indeed, 10 billion people are wrong! It doesn’t take rocket science or in-depth SEO knowledge to explain why, in fact a 5-year old can understand it. So why do so many people fall for the SEO snake-oil ads that promise to get you on Google’s front page?
Any ad that claims to be able to do so is created either by a charlatan or an idiot – which one would you rather lose your money to?
Here’s why (It’s so simple I actually feel silly having to explain it). Assume for the sake of simplicity that your computer screen can show 10 results per page on Google. Now ask yourself one stunningly obvious question:
Even if this one particular charlatan is a genius and can somehow get sites into the top 10 at the flick of a switch, he can only do it for 10 sites!!! The clue is in the question: “top 10“. Now factor in all the other thousands of charlatans. If it easy enough for the first to do it (unless he’s some special kind of magician) then its just as easy for any/all of the others. Thus even if you site gets in the top 10, it will only stay there till then next cycle of Google’s crawler when it spots one of the competing sites that gets ranked above you.
And even if your money has gone to an SEO magician who can then somehow wrangle you back into the top 10 by deceiving Google or frigging the results somehow….
C’mon, people: are you so desperate to get highly ranked that your common sense evaporates and you are willing to throw money down the drain? I’m afraid that my view on this particular brand of snake oil is the same as “419″ or “advance fee” frauds. If you are so greedy and so stupid as to think some nice west african will give you a slice of 10 million bucks as long as you give him 1o,000 first, then you deserve to lose your money!
If you really are that dumb, please click on my “donate” button (top right) and give it to me instead. I guarantee that it will be spent on strong drink, loose women and recreational chemicals.
And that is more honest than all of the SEO charlatans put together.
I have just mastered the godaddy.com free photo gallery interface, so here’s a few samples of my photos from various exotic locations including: Papua New Guinea, Iraq, Solomon Islands, Egypt, Israel, The Bahamas, Federated States of Micronesia, Australia, Thailand, Malta, Sweden, Poland, Turkey, France, Spain and even good old England! Many of them were taken on old fashioned film cameras (a Canon T90 and a Nikon FM2) but the more recent digital ones were with a Canon EOS 1000D
Q: What have slug repellant and guitar pickups got to do with ATX PSUs and homebrew PCB fabrication?
A: read on…
As part of my PSU project, I have four ACS712 current sensing modules (from ebay of course!) to measure the 3.3v,5v, 12v and variable v rails coming out of my recycled ATX power supply. The space inside the case is at a premium and I want to slot them all down the side of the case but of course I don’t want them flapping free. I needed to mount them on some sort of PCB…like this:
Because I’m still at the prototype / design stage, I didn’t want to permanently solder the pins, so the long header method was adopted, Ok, so only 50% of the pins are used but it’s a lot less fiddly than soldering four separate 3-pin headers. It’s what’s on the other side of the board that answers the strange introductory question!
I can’t afford an online PCB design service for a one-off and so I’m left with stripboard, matrix board or copper-clad + masking etching etc. The latter is still a bit advanced for me, so strip/matrix was the answer. I wondered if I couldn’t find some sort of conductive sticky copper tape and hand-hack a layout on the reverse.
I did my research on ebay and found just what I needed: 6mm wide adhesive copper tape. What surprised me is that its main uses appear to be repelling slugs and repairing guitar pickups! Some ads also cite “PCB repair” but there’s a difference between “repair” and “complete design”. At least my design wasn’t too complex. Even so, I guessed it would be fiddly – if it worked at all – and it sure as hell was, but boys, it can be done:
(click for full size)
You will have to take my word that the (semi) finished product has continuity between all the points it should have, and none between all the points it shouldn’t, i.e. that it actually does work.
The photo shows most of the tools you need – what’s missing is a good straight edge as the first step is to slice the 6mm tape along its length to produce two very slim 3mm strips. Also you need some sort of burnishing tool to smooth out any wrinkles and make sure that every single square nanometer of the tape is as flat as flat can be and adhering to the matrix board. Also you need either better eyes than mine or a damn good magnifier / loupe.
Other tips if you want to give this a try:
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